Herbert Kretzmer began his life and career as a journalist in South Africa. He came into my life in 1962, arriving at the flat in Ebury Street to interview me for the Daily Express. He was the broadsheet’s theatre critic at the time and doubled as their showbiz journalist. In fact, during his tenure in Fleet Street, he interviewed many of the notables who came to those shores, and many who didn’t. We got along famously and remain friends today. He no longer works as a newspaper man. He retired when Les Misérables the musical, for which he wrote all the English lyrics, hit the jackpot.
In the 1950s, he spent time in Spain, and interviewed both the great matadors of the era: Antonio Ordoñez, who became close friends with Orson Wells—it is on Ordonez’s ranch that Orson was laid to rest—and Luis Miguel Dominguin, the tall aristocratic Spaniard known outside the ring for his tempestuous affair with Ava Gardner, who was married to Frank Sinatra at the time.
Kretzmer talked with Dominguin on the eve of his return to the ring after a lag of many years. The maestro, who had debuted at age eleven, told him he was returning because “life was not dangerous enough,” and likened fighting with bulls to making love to a beautiful woman and being discovered by her husband… with a gun! He confessed to beginning his comeback in the Balearics away from Madrid and Barcelona as “learning to love with country girls.”
During his audience with Ordoñez, he asked the great man to describe the day leading up to the fight, which usually began at 6:30 in the evening. Ordonez explained that the afternoon was spent in a room at a good hotel near the plaza where the spectacle was staged. The shutters would be drawn. He would be alone with the sounds of the bands and the revellers celebrating the day of the fiesta, awaiting his team, who would come bringing his traje de lujes, his suit of lights—designed for him by his friend Pablo Picasso—and help him dress.
“Are you nervous?” Kretzmer asked.
“The bull isn’t in the room,” Ordoñez answered.
Kretzmer knew that when a matador is gored, the injury is measured by how many inches the bull’s horns have entered his groin. He waited. Ordoñez continued. “Waiting in the ring, yes, there is fear. As soon as the bull sees me, no!”
I am not comparing the actor on stage or in front of a camera with the extreme courage of a matador on fight day. Yet the level of required awareness begs comparison. The bull is not in the hotel. In the ring, one’s feet in the heat of the sand, the fear is the anticipation of the animal’s attention, but as it charges, no. No room for fear. For the fighter of bulls, fear is thought. No space for thought. This is the bottom line. Orson knew it: Ordoñez and Dominquin are perhaps the definitive examples of his “high wire” artist.